Electrical Design - Fall Semester

Motor Control

Dave and Aaron have done a lot of good work on the electrical control system. One huge milestone they recently achieved was writing a contol program which enabled them to control the rotation of a stepper motor to within 3 degrees! The test motors were actually salvaged from an old inkjet printer. How's that for recycling? Here are some more specifications for their control program:

Programmable Speed

JTAG UART debug terminal interface

Unipolar H-bridge driving circuit

Control System Design

The above block diagram lays out the control method for our machine. Click on the image for a larger view.

Code Encoded

Right now we have a working motor controller! We can control the rotation of the motor to within 0.2 degrees, using a combination of stepper motor hardware and software based "micro-stepping."

Currently we're working on translating a schematic file into G-code, the machine language used to control stepper motors.

Following that, we'll be working on the user interface, enabling a computer to comunicate with the mill.